With his most recent series as a starting point, this exhibition gathers significant works from the last 10 years by the Lebanese-Dutch artist Bilal Chahal. This is his third show with the gallery, and the second one in Bogotá.

In his Khronos and Kairos¹ series, Chahal materializes the duality of time in the recurring shape of an uneven, elongated chair. Going against the convention of time representation associated with time-measuring devices such as calendars or clocks, a chair appears as a stand-in for waiting, reunion, tension, and meaning. Distorted by their uncertain state in space and time, these painterly chairs are both precise and elusive, elastic and finite, painfully slow and vanishingly fleeting.

The composite nature of time is also conveyed through the material aggregations on the pictorial surface. The spontaneous and fluid strokes that define these chairs conceal the thick, multilayered strata of pigment blending beneath: a unique and demanding process that takes weeks to complete. A dense yet porous patina, and the broad and rich color fields that overtake the field of vision further dilute the temporality of his paintings. 

The materiality of his drawings is also a temporal paradox, as these are made by tearing apart, painting over, and blending together earlier works by Chahal himself, with forgotten imagery reborn as a fresh surface for a new, spontaneous work to emerge. As an homage to this self-archaeology of previous works that, although not belonging to the same series, showcase that the quest for materiality, labyrinth-like and self-contained spaces, and the longing for a fleeting time has always been present in his oeuvre.

Juaniko Moreno

¹In Greek, Kronos defines quantitative and measurable time, that which rules our lives in the shape of schedules and calendars. Kairós, on the other hand, alludes to a decisive and critical moment, qualitative time, one centered in meaningful or purposeful events. Related to the mythical titan of time and the god of chance, both figures profoundly shape Chahal’s representation of time.